This new collection by the internationally known poet and translator Carlos Reyes adds to the rich treasure chest of poems from a restless and inveterate traveler whose work has taken us to Spain, Ecuador, France, Ireland, the Arctic, the Galapagos, Mexico, Panama, Italy, and now India. In these poems a talent for visual texture and detail, coupled with the poet’s familiarity with a huge variety of social and cultural matrixes, produces a close and sometimes troubling view of the contrast between American assumptions of privilege and India’s blend of fantastically rich culture and the bitterly desperate social and economic circumstances to be found there in the lives of common folk.

Carlos Reyes has published nine collections of poems, including The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems, and many volumes of poems in translation, including the four-volume Complete Poetic Works of Jorge Carrera Andrade, and the award winning Poemas de la Isla, by Josefina de la Torre. He has been recipient of a Heinrich Boll Fellowship, and fellowships from Yaddo and the Fundacion Valparaiso (Mojacar, Spain). He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, when he is not traveling.

Quietly and steadily Carlos Reyes has been writing some of the finest poetry of his generation. – Vern Rutsala

Reyes is one of our local and national treasures. His poetry is as clear and strong as his social conscience. One is always struck by his sensual and sensory qualities: the touch, taste, feel, color of things, and his ability to capture a mood, a world, in a handful of lines. – Carolyn Kizer